


Don't Come Around Here No More

by Carbocat



Series: The Same Old You [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Hurt Steve Harrington, Sick Character, Sneaking Out, Suicidal Thoughts, Survivor Guilt, inspired by the season 3 trailer
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-04-11 19:14:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19115989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carbocat/pseuds/Carbocat
Summary: He blinked eyes that were blue instead of yellow, instead red, “What?”“You got wheels right, Hargrove?” Steve’s voice came out slow, warped into a smile. His voice came out in the same whisper as mad to live, mad to be saved, burn, burn, burn. “You ever sneak out?”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to live inside of this very sad world a little more and maybe breathe something more into it instead of the depressing cryfest that Don't Do Me Like That was. 
> 
> This takes place somewhere within Don't Do Me Like That before the funeral and the gun but after the Battle of Starcourt. Steve's still sick and Billy still feels guilty, and this should build upon both of them.

_The only people for me are the mad ones…_

The voice on the line drawled out the words like a curse and the whisper of a promise, like cursive written on the darkness of the night sky. The voice on the line seeped from the receiver and pooled into the palm of his hands until the voice was all that stood in the neon glow of the numbers flashing green on the stove clock, _3:45._

The voice on the line settled at the base of his neck as if it had always been there, clenching around the nerve and breathing wet warmth against his ear, ancient all the way down to his soul. It _crawled_ over the phone wire and it invaded his skin. It made itself a home in his throat, pressing those words into his mouth in the softest of kisses and leaving them lingering and weighty on his tongue.

He could taste the words like they were his own, like they were thought up in his head and _eaten_ on his tongue. He could taste the bitterness of those words, could taste the sour, the loss. The something kind of chalky and the something dirty, the _something_ that tasted of hunger and want coagulating in a silver spoon.

 _The one who are mad to live,_ the voice licked over his bottom lip. It coaxed his mouth slack and his lips apart, licking over his tongue and pressing against his teeth. The voice was probing, it was speaking.

It _wanted_ something that it would not say, _mad to talk…_

The night sky was nothing, but teeth pressed to his jugular and a smile so vicious that cut against his pulse. The night was nothing but gasping for breath and the grind of teeth against silence, against sobbing. The night was the gnawing nightmarish feeling of rats in his _bones_.

The night was nothing.

The night was wide and expanding, and pressing down and compressing into just this moment with this phone call and this savior in the deep heavy voice that whispered, _mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time._

He had only picked up the phone because it was ringing.

He only picked up because he was awake.

He was _always_ awake because the night dripped blood into the corners of his eyes. The night painted over his vision with nightmares, with rats, with pale translucent skin sliced to death beneath claws. The night echoed with words that said _it hurts,_ that said _you’re back,_ that smiled with black and blood between its teeth and lied, _it’s going to be okay. Hold on._

He night gnawed him hungry and hollow for something that could never fill him, and guilt pooled around his feet until he drowns in it.

The night was black the way that nightmares were black, the way that blood was black pooling beneath his feet, the way that bruises turned black in the center where the needle pierced the skin. The night was unforgiving.

The night never relented.

The night wrapped big hands, clawed monstrous hands, around his throat and squeezed until everything short-circuited. It reached into his mouth and it grew his teeth into daggers, his bones into monsters. The night stretched his skin beyond repair and choked on flesh, on copper, on the minty taste of toothpaste that never did anything.

The night was a _threat_ and a promise, and a memory of all the things that he would never be able to change. The night was this moment, with this voice that sat words on his tongue and forced him to swallow.

He swallowed.

The voice on the line whispered haunted, _burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding._

His throat itched with the words piling into it, that were shoveled down to make room for more in his mouth, for _burn, burn, burn_ like _bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,_ and _Billy, Billy, Billy,_ and _what’s happening, what’s wrong, you gotta listen to me, buddy. You got to fight this, strong guy._

The words filled him the way that nothing has since _that_ night, the way nothing ever would again. They filled him and they filled him, and they pressed further down his throat. The words gathered in his blood and expanded his veins, and they pressed into his stomach until all that felt loose on him was fat and bloated, and _full_.

He did push-ups religiously now. He lifted weights to burn off the day, and the hunger, and everything else. His arms ached at the shoulders and the phone shook in his hand, but he didn’t put it down.

He couldn’t.

He only picked up the phone because it was _3:47_ and it was ringing, and he said nothing as the voice repeated like a mantra and a promise, like a ghost haunting him and this moment, _the only people for me are the mad ones…_

The only reason that he had answered the phone was because he could. He was awake and no one else was, and that made him feel dangerous. It made him _want_ to be dangerous, to want to be the monster that he was and the monster that he became because bother were better and killable than the empty overstretched _husk_ that he was now.

He only answered the phone because his hands were human, and his mind was human, and his voice – it was human too.

The voice on the line trailed off into silence and he blinked. He scowled at the green numbers on the oven clock, _3:48_ , and he snapped his teeth together audibly, “What the actual fuck are you talking about, Harrington?”

“My gran used to say that all the time,” The voice on the line said, a smile present in that sleepy voice. Billy could _feel_ the smile. “Every time I got angry about something, she would repeat that over and over until I wasn’t angry anymore. I think she made it up to make me smile.”

“Wow, your grandma made that up?” Billy said flatly, harshly. His voice was too sharp and too loud in the silence. “Who knew that your grandma was Jack fucking Kerouac then, huh? Who would’ve fucking thought that _your_ grandma came up with the _most_ popular thing he’s _ever_ said, _wow_.”

Harrington didn’t respond the way that others responded to him, then and now. There was no pause, no sharp gasped intake. There was nothing but that soft haunt of laughter and that slimy wet swallowed of his voice, “Did it make you smile though?”

 _No_. No, he wasn’t smiling.

Billy felt the words seep out of him.

They weren’t Harrington’s words and they weren’t his either, so they didn’t matter. He felt tired, cold, empty, “What do you want, Harrington?”

“I can’t sleep,” He said, licking his wet tongue over dry sandpaper lips. It was _audible_ over the line, Billy could practically hear the crunch of him biting his lip as he struggled with whatever he really wanted to say.

Billy didn’t have the patience for it, “I’m hanging up.”

“What? Don’t,” His voice came out sharp and shattered, piercing the skin like a hundred lift-saving needles in his neck. Like teeth baring sharp, like claws. “I – you know, I went to the doctor today?”

Billy knew that, yeah.

He didn’t see Harrington today and he has seen Harrington every day since the fourth of July and the Battle of Starcourt, but he hadn’t today. They didn’t really talk like this, about _this_ , but didn’t stop Billy’s stomach from bottoming out, “Yeah?”

“Yeah, the sun was out today,” Steve said quick and sharp, coughing over his words. Billy heard him spit slime, heard his sad little smile in his voice, “The big old August sun and _humid_ , it was gross, and I _loved_ it. I haven’t felt the sun on my face since – I don’t know when. I’ve forgotten what summer felt like.”

Since the Fourth of July, Billy wanted to supply, to roll his eyes. He wanted to point out that Harrington hasn’t experienced one of Indiana’s shitty summer days because Harrington was _dying_ , because Billy _bit_ him and infected him.

He was a monster and Harrington was a fucking idiot.

Billy tapped his black fingernails on the countertop and he shrugged his shoulders even though Steve couldn’t see that. He said, “The sun ain’t fucking shining now, so what’s your point?”

“My point is…” Steve drawled out slowly, “Have you ever broken anybody out of prison?”

Billy blinked at the neon green numbers on the stove, watching them turned from _3:49_ to _3:50_ and wondered when life got so fucking surreal. He wondered when Harrington got this stupid, if he had always been this way and Billy had underestimated it.

Maybe he was already dead.

Maybe he didn’t get out that Scoop’s Ahoy freezer. Maybe his armor gave way to bullets and guns, and he died monstrous in the middle of the Battle of Starcourt. Maybe Harrington got him the cure and he died anyways.

Maybe Hell was just Hawkins, just Harrington haunting him and pressing pretentious asshole quotes into his mouth.

Maybe all that would ever be was this moment and this phone call, this conversation.

Maybe Harrington died in his sleep and this was all that either of them had.

He blinked eyes that were blue instead of yellow, instead of red, “What?”

“You got wheels right, Hargrove?” Steve’s voice came out slow, warped into a smile. His voice came out in the same whisper as _mad to live, mad to be saved, burn, burn, burn._ “You ever sneak out?”

“W- yeah?” Billy answered, blinking. “Why are you calling me?”

“I think it’s pretty obvious, Billy.”


	2. Chapter 2

_I’m with you in Hawkins…_

Where the night lurked beyond the door.

In Hawkins, where the night was an all-encompassing emptiness. In Hawkins, where the night was a tangible black expansion of starless nothingness stretched far beyond the front door of Neil’s house.

Where the night was empty.

It was bleak.

In Hawkins, the night was the prison and the guard.

The night smiled dark deadly infection. It unfolded its face like flower petals and bared rows and rows of rat-infested teeth, sharp as a razor. It _hissed_ , whispering through the door like a siren out at sea.

The night tapped, tapped, tapped rotten overgrown fingernails against the glass. It beaconed him. It called, _Billy_.

It whispered, _you are the only monster here._

It whispered, _it’s always been that way._

The night ate at him, feasting bloody and raw as it tore the flesh from the bone of every repeated nightmare of _that_ night. The night echoed with the threat that Neil had made, _I don’t know what situation you got yourself into, son, but you get yourself out of it. You hear me?_

The night made him flinch the way that Neil had made him flinch when he snapped the medical bracelet from his thinned wrist. The night hit like a slap, like a dinner plate over someone else’s head.

The night needled at _respect and responsibility,_ digging its claws in and finding a place to rationalize walking out the door.

The night said, _he could have called anybody._

The night said, _he called you._

There were boots on his feet and a sweatshirt over his atrophied muscles and his loose skin, and Billy scrubbed at his face with a sigh. His hair was wild and dead to its roots. His eyes were blue, not yellow. Not red.

He breathed out.

He was human.

_This_ was him.

There was a monster inside of him but there had always been a monster inside of him. There was a darkness there like the darkness beyond the door, but it had been there before that night, before this night.

This was him – what was left of him. 

There was only the door between him and the night. There was only him and the neon green glow from the clock on the kitchen stove. There was only him and the buzz from the phone he didn’t hang up.

There was only him and his black fingernails, and that lingering voice from the phone line echoing in the back of his head, _the only people for me are the mad ones._

The night tapped, tapped, tapped, _I’m with you in Hawkins…_

Where they were both prisoners. Where Harrington was like him, but different, but better, but dying. Where phone calls were made, and monsters were managed, and there was just a door between him and the night.

The night was a trap and Hawkins was a prison unto itself.

It was the closed door of a nightmare labyrinth, a complex maze with no outs, no bars, no escape. It was shifting walls and monster dimensions, and it buried beneath the skin and never left.

It was Harrington on the phone with someone else’s words. Harrington’s voice, climbing into his mouth. Harrington whispering, _I think it’s pretty obvious, Billy._

The night curled beneath the door with that same weighty voice and it came inside. It goaded him and teased him and reminded him of all the things that went bump in the darkness. The night smiled with all its teeth because they both _knew_.

The scariest thing in the dark was _him_.

He was the monster in the maze.

The night slipped its skeleton key hand over top of his. It wedged its boney fingers between his black fingernails, seeping from its palms all the blood that he spilled. The night lingered like the burnt taste of flesh between his teeth, pulling at something that wasn’t there anymore.

The night whispered, _you killed him. You’re going to kill him._

The night whispered, _doing this won’t ease your guilt._

“Shut up.”

“Billy?”

The sound of Maxine’s voice behind him startled something painful out of him. His spine went stiff and his hands curled into fists, and he wanted to snap at her but couldn’t find the words to do it.

The floorboards creaked under her weight as she stepped further from the safety of her bedroom. She sounded sleepy, like she wasn’t quite awake enough to remember that she had to be scared, when she asked, “What are you doing up?”

For a second, they were just Billy and Max.

There was a second where he could pretend that night never happened and that they hated each other for normal reasons. He wasn’t the monster that sentenced her babysitter to death. He wasn’t empty.

But the second ended and that fear seeped back into her voice when she spoke again, “Who are you talking to?”

Billy wanted to laugh, to fucking _cry_.

There was never going to be another moment in his life where she didn’t first thing of the Mind Flayer. No one that was there that night was ever going to look at him and not see the monster first.

It pissed him off.

He didn’t _choose_ for any of that shit to happen to him. He didn’t make any of the fucking decisions that led to him being wrapped up in that Upside Down bullshit. He was driving to pick _her_ up. He got bit by that rat because of her.

She took a step back when he cut a hard gaze to her. She let out an involuntary gasp, eyes darting around the room for a weapon that would not save her if he was anything other than human right now. His eyes weren’t yellow or red, but she was still afraid of him.

She was smart like that.

There was no heat in his voice because there was no fire left in him. It was all a dead well-worn routine that they were just maintaining because they were all just pretending that he was normal, “It’s none of your fucking business what I do, Maxine.”

He turned his back to her and he took a step forward.

It was not the night that put his hand on the glass doorknob. It was not the night that flipped the lock or turned the handle, that pushed the screen door open and let it fall closed behind him.

_He_ was the one.

He ignored Max’s question about where he was going and her reminder that Neil said not to go out at night anymore. He was the one that walked into the night’s abyss because he was human, because Harrington asked him.

_I’m with you in Hawkins,_ he repeated like a mantra and a promise, a prayer. He was the one with words that were not his own and not Harrington’s. He was the one that was _mad to talk, mad to be saved._

The night might have been a monster with teeth like cut glass, but Billy was so much worse. Billy tethered the other-world to this world, invaded the monster that invaded him, and he was just _mad_ enough to be saved.

He was alive.

_He_ was what was left inside.

He took step, after step, after step into the darkness until Maxine was nothing more than a shadow behind the screen door. He was solid in this form. He was determined and moving forward, no longer chasing after memories that were tainted with blood.

The night smiled its big razor-sharp Cheshire grin, opening its mouth like petals, and Billy smiled back. The night turned the sweetest kiss into a massacre, and Billy _bit_ back.

He did not turn to look at Maxine because everything he wanted was in front of him. Everything he wanted was _Harrington_.

_Mad to live. Mad to talk. Mad to be saved._

The night was not _that_ night.

This night, it was human hands that unlocked Susan’s shitty little Sudan. It was blue human eyes that reflected back at him in the rearview mirror. It was a human mind that told him to turn around, that said that this was a mistake.

It was a human kind of determination that put the car into drive. It was a human kind of _obsession_ that latched onto Harrington’s words like a lifeline, _I think it’s pretty obvious, Billy_.

It was the night that hummed someone else’s voice and someone else’s words, that turned Hawkins into Rockland, into a prison. It was the night that reminded him, _I’m with you in Hawkins._

Billy didn’t _care_.

Harrington was in Hawkins. Harrington – who did not want to die in Hawkins was going to do just that, and Billy, he’d died a hundred tiny deaths just to die with him too.

The night was empty.

The moon was sliced in half.

It was _wrong,_ and Billy knew it.

The car hummed beneath the palms of his hands and the leather _breathed_ sticky against his back, and he knew that all of this was so fucking wrong. He was not defiant, not brave, not strong. He was going because he was selfish, because it was _wrong_.

Harrington shouldn’t have called him.

The realization of it was invading and sad, and so stupid. Everything inside of him that felt alive was telling him to be _smart_ about it. It was telling him to turn around and assure Maxine that he was not a monster on this night, telling him to go to bed and pretend that this night was like the rest of them.

It told him to open his eyes in the morning to the sun slotting through his blinds and put his broken mask back on. It told him to call Harrington on the phone and tell him that he would never see him again.

He was not human.

He was a monster in human skin.

He was a ghost of himself haunting his own life, and everything left inside of him told him to drive the fucking car off a cliff. Monsters were meant to be ran out of town and he _was_ a monster – he ate flesh and he killed people, and he infected Harrington with _death_.

And Harrington…

Harrington was a monster hunter, a hero, an idiot. He should know better than this.

He wasn’t supposed to save him. He wasn’t supposed to be calling him up in the middle of the night and drawling with that slimy sick voice, _you got wheels, Hargrove?_

He wasn’t supposed to smile when Billy had dragged his IV stand into his hospital room either. He wasn’t supposed to punch him lightly in the shoulder and offer him his jello and tell him that he had nothing to be sorry for.

He wasn’t supposed to tell him about those dumb kids, or hold his hand, or offer to teach him Smoke on the Water on his guitar.

Harrington wasn’t – Harrington wasn’t _his_ because Harrington was _good_. Billy didn’t deserve – Billy ruined good things. He killed them.

Harrington didn’t even have words that were his own. He didn’t have a future left to live and it was Billy’s _fault._ He didn’t have anything at all and he called Billy, and he asked dumb questions. It was so fucking sad.

_Jesus._ It was sad.

Billy didn’t have to go, and he _shouldn’t._

He should turn around, but he wasn’t going to.

There was this inkling tugging at something in his chest, something akin to terror chipping away at his numb defense. It was something big and weighty at the back of his throat that said that Harrington had called him for a reason and he didn’t know what the reason was.

There was something very sad, and very true, and very _very_ that said he was the only person who could do whatever this was for Harrington. If he turned it down than…

He didn’t know.

Harrington was an idiot calling monsters to his front door and this night felt a lot like _July_ , felt like the night that his eyes turned yellow and his bones shifted. He was never going to be a man again, just a beast beneath man’s clothing.

He knew what flesh tasted like between his teeth. He knew the coppery taste of blood lapping over his tongue and the feeling of your face unfolding into teeth. He knew what it felt like to be hungry and to only be hungry, and he didn’t _get_ it.

What did Harrington want with any of him?

He rubbed at the bruise on his neck, pinching at the skin until his mind went fuzzy and tears came to his eyes. He told himself, “Stop.”

The night was so fucking bleak, but life was bleak.

He had no reason to move forward with anything, but he did because he was human. Humans did a lot of shit that they didn’t want to do.

Harrington saved his life. He didn’t have to.

His father beat respect and responsibility into him. He didn’t have to.

He lived. He didn’t _want_ to.

_Fuck_.

Billy shook the thought from his head, breathing out through his nose as he turned onto Loch Nora. The street lights were still out on this side of town from the Starcourt showdown, pitching everything into a thick black.

The only things visible were caught in the headlights of his car, quick to fade away.

There was nothing in the world but him, and the journey, and the plan.

Break Harrington out of his prison.

It was so fucking stupid.

Those words from the phone whispered in his ear as he followed the twists and turns, listening to the static on the radio and the rustle of the trees, _mad to talk, mad to be saved._

They whispered the words that Harrington hadn’t said, that his grandmother might have, and Jack Kerouac most definitely had. They whispered the words that came before, _I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who would interest me…_

_Because the only people for me are the mad ones._

And Billy.

He had always been a mad one, a crazy one. He’d always been a so-fucking-angry-all-the-goddamn-time one, but Harrington…

It didn’t really make any sense to him _why_ Harrington – _how_ someone like Harrington, who sentenced himself to death to save someone he hated, was ever mad enough to _talk_ , to be saved. He didn’t understand why his grandmother would ever need to give him those words.

Billy blinked.

He slammed on the breaks outside of Harrington’s house and he thought about turning around for the hundredth time. He didn’t need to shamble after anybody, not Maxine, not Heather, and especially not Steve Harrington.

He didn’t need answers to questions that he would never ask. He didn’t need anything because he was alive.

He had choices.

He didn’t have to listen to Harrington because he didn’t _owe_ Harrington anything – except his life and he didn’t even _want_ it.

The only light on in the Harrington household seemed to be coming from somewhere deep inside. It flickered dimly through the open curtains of a window on the top floor. Everything else was pitched in the same darkness as the rest of the neighborhood.

Billy’s eyes stayed drawled to that dim light on the second floor. He didn’t notice the shadow that rounded the house from the back or the hand that ghosted over the side of the car until it was pulling on the passenger side door, “C’mon, Hargrove.”

Harrington’s eyes were too light when he ducked his head into the car, passing a grin over cracked cherry red lips like they were sharing silent secrets, like they were friends when they weren’t, “Hey, man.”

Billy wanted to say, _what the fuck, Harrington?_

He wanted to say, _I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry._

“Get in the fucking car, Harrington,” He snapped. “You’re letting all the cool air out.”

“Gee, hold your horse, Hargrove,” Steve said with a wet laugh, coughing against the back of his hand as he dropped into the passenger seat. His shoulders curled in with the force of it before he cleared his throat.

It didn’t seem to help much with the way that his shoulders kept pitching forward like he needed to keep coughing. He leaned out of the car, spitting black on the pavement, “Damn, I think I swallowed a bug.”

It was an unconvincing lie, but Billy didn’t have it in him to call him out for it. He couldn’t even if he wanted to because when Harrington leaned back into the car he had that damn bat.

Billy held his breath, watching Harrington’s fingers dance down the neck to rest just above the bent nails as he rested it against his knees. His hand stayed loosely around the neck even as he closed the door.

Billy thought to himself, _this is it._

He thought, _Harrington called him because he wanted his revenge and the only price worth paying was in blood._

He thought, _I deserve this._

Harrington took a few more breaths before declaring loudly, “Man, I am _starving.”_

There was something like relief that bubbled up out of his throat and croaked out of his mouth in a shattered kind of laughter. Billy could feel his bottom lip tremble and then felt annoyed, and stupid, “Why the fuck do you have that thing?”

Harrington was a – he was the definition of dichotomy, sitting in the passenger seat of Susan’s fucking car.

He was red lips and wide golden eyes, and skin so pale and fragile that it looked translucent. Billy could see the darkness crawling up the inside of his face. He could see the gross manifestation of infection that had ate into Harrington and he – he still looked like a fucking angel.

He looked like salvation in a fucking polo.

Steve was the Upside Down and Hawkins all at once. He was a person that was alive and dead, and dying. He was a person that was both places and belonged to neither, and he snorted, “ _Because_.”

_Because_ wasn’t a fucking answer.

Billy wanted to punch him. He wanted to fucking drown Harrington half the time and it would be fucking easy to do it too.

Billy could picture it.

There was no sweet talking needed. There was nothing but the simple suggestion that they go to the pool, or the quarry, or to – fucking _church_ for the last baptism of Harrington’s cursed life.

Harrington would follow, easy.

Harrington saved him. He dropped the fucking bat instead of using it. He _pleaded_ with him when he should have killed him, and now he was dying. He would let him lead him wherever he wanted, and he wasn’t strong enough to stop Billy. He never was.

The thought made him feel sick.

It made him want to cry, want to ask, _are you going to use that bat on me?_

He said instead, “If you’re so hungry then go fucking eat.”

“That is – the plan, my man,” Steve nodded, dipping his head down to look at his house. “Let’s go to the all-night diner.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A FEW THINGS: 
> 
> (1) It looks like Jack Kerouac is going to be consistently mentioned throughout this story. He's the one who said 'the only people for me are the mad ones' quote which is from On The Road, a book I do not recommend because it's terrible.  
> (2) The 'With You in Hawkins' thing is a play on the third section of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl where he said 'I'm with you in Rockland' which was a psychiatric hospital that Ginsberg was at in 1949.  
> (3) This chapter is twice as long as the first!  
> (4) Thank you for everybody that has taken the time to read this story and Don't Do Me Like That, it means so much to me! Especially since it meant you braved the tags.  
> (5) I am on [tumblr](https://morganbritton132.tumblr.com/)  
> if you wanna come yell at me.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An Ode to season three, which this is no longer compatible. I added a few things here and there from season three but since this is based on a different fic, most of it is different from the show

The Rock Around the Clock diner sat on the outskirts of town.

It was a secluded little place among the trees, but seclusion in Hawkins just meant that it was ten minutes away from everything else. There was no privacy in a town this unbearably small, no getting away when everything was surrounded by miles upon miles of cornfields.

It was a pitstop to nowhere. It was an exit sign on the highway that you didn’t notice. It barely made the maps.

Hawkins fit on the head of a nickel that was always at risk of flipping upside down. It was the place that you came to die, unknown and unnoticed. Unnamed in the newspaper headline.

It was a skin crawling feeling, to know.

To know what really lurked in the shadows of the old steel mill, to know what crawled in the movements of the trees, what wavered in the big dead eyes of pale kids was a never-letting-go realization that you were going to die in fucking _Indiana._ It was the missed step-feel of your stomach bottoming out and the ghost of a breath so cold to the touch that it _burnt_ into something horrible.

It made every action of every person sinister.

It made everything that this town had to offer feel heavy handed and weighty on his spine, on his shoulders, on his tongue where he was _invaded_. Hawkins was small to a claustrophobic degree and scary because it was so easy to wade knee deep into the center of _something_ that you didn’t even know.

Thirty people died.

There was no escaping Hawkins, even at the all-night diner on the outskirts of town. Even if he hadn’t stopped when Harrington told him too, hadn’t turned left and then right.

If he had kept driving until the city limits were behind them than Hawkins would still be there. It would be in the car, on his loose skin and Harrington’s dying breaths.

_If he had known… if he had never gotten out of his car, never crashed, never invited Karen Wheeler to that shitty motel… if he hadn’t fucked up so bad in California than…_

Billy shook at the ‘what if’s in his head until they jumbled into nothing because they didn’t _help_.

It didn’t change the uneven shake of Susan’ shitty car or that his car was a scrap heap. It didn’t change Harrington’s hitched little breaths in the passenger seat, or his black fingernails, or how he was going to _die_.

The all-night diner loomed from the shadows with the neon glow of its Open Twenty-Four Hours sign, practically _eaten_ by the forest around it. It was stuck in this act of being devoured by the trees and anything that could have been beyond the dark thicket.

It was frozen in the moment of _something_ that looked to be happening in the same way that Billy used to be happening, in the way that Harrington used to be alive.

The all-night diner was the melt of a surrealist’s nightmare.

_The all-night diner was a fucking mistake._

Billy should never had went to get Harrington from his house. He shouldn’t have gone against Neil’s explicit rules about leaving in the middle of the night, shouldn’t have scared Max, or answered the phone, or be alive.

He should never have walked out of that mall.

This was _wrong_.

The ring of the bell over the door was tinny and loud inside the thick atmosphere. The door closed with a nearly silent thump and Billy felt the eyes of the patrons on him, felt like he was straddling the line between _here_ and _nowhere else_ , between real and a dream.

His feet were planted on the checkered tiles and he felt like he could grow roots there. He felt like he was never going to move again.

There was nothing that felt real about standing inside of pink and green walls at two AM, about being bombarded by the too loud crooning of The Has Been King, Elvis Presley, from the jukebox in the corner. Everything was settled into this sickly doo-woopy nineteen fifties feel in the middle of middle America, of Hawkins, Indiana, of a goddamn government coverup.

It was _weird_. It was wrong.

It was so fucking _typical_ , the way that this place looked and felt. It picked at the scabs on his chest like they were never there at all, and he wanted to laugh. He wanted to fucking _cry_.

It was so goddamn typical that Hawkins would just paint over the walls and change the name, and scrub the blood from the groove so that everybody forgot that the man that used to own this place was fucking murdered here two years ago.

So _typical_ of the town that ‘ _forgot’_ about the kid that went missing in the woods, about the dead girl or the guy from Radio Shack that got gutted. So _typical_ that they’re all back to normal even though thirty people died and were buried in empty caskets, even though Steve Harrington was dying, even though Billy tried to destroy the _world_.

_I’m with you in Hawkins where you are madder than I._

_Mad to talk. Mad to be saved._

Hawkins was _always_ going to be the place with the gate, with the monsters on the other side and the whispered stories of government coverup. They can all sit back in their little idyllic lives and close their curtains to the outside, but it was always going to be the same.

Places don’t change. People don’t change. The art of pretending was that everybody had to do it or it didn’t work, and Billy wasn’t fucking doing _that_.

He opened his mouth to spit black infected _truth_ onto the floor of this Norman Rockwell _hell_ , to say that they were fucking doomed, to say that he was a monster and he was _hungry._

It was a different Has Been King that bumped his shoulder from behind, jarring him forward and losing his words. Harrington was all breathy in his ear, “Let’s get a booth in the back, yeah?”

Harrington moved around him with shaky legs and awkward steps, like a brand new calf still learning to walk. Billy wanted for his lingering touch at his elbow to stay but it fizzled at the edges and dropped with heavy exhaustion.

He couldn’t help but wonder when the last time Harrington had been out of bed. He couldn’t help but follow behind him – _shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me_ – waddling through the sticky butter-clotted air.

Harrington dropped heavy onto the peeling polyvinyl seats of the booth in the back by the windows and shed the dumb backpack he brought with him. The lights overhead flickered for a second and evened out, as Harrington said, _Benny Hammond used to own this place, man. Benny’s Burgers was the tops._

He picked up a menu with shaky hands and black fingernails, saying, _Benny used to coach the JV baseball team when I was a freshman._

He coughed black into a napkin, _Dustin told me that he was killed protecting Eleven._

Billy thought about saying, _I almost killed Eleven._

He thought about saying, _I killed thirty people, you’re dining with a serial killer._

He said in a tired drawn out sigh, “Am I supposed to know who any of these people are, Harrington?”

Steve’s mouth pulled down into a little frown and he tilted his head in a way that clearly said, _‘I wish you would get your shit together, Hargrove, yeah, you should fucking know these people.’_ It was stale disappointment, gone too quickly to really taste the bitterness of it as Steve straighten up and shrugged.

Billy laid the point on thick, “Because I _don’t_.”

Harrington looked fucking terrible under the florescent lighting, damp at his temples and pale all over, big gold eyes unnatural in his face. He looked worse than he did in the natural lighting of his ugly fucking bedroom, worse than he did in the eerie artificial glow of the hospital lights.

There was something haunted about him, _ghostly._ He looked like someone that had died here a long time ago, and everybody was just being too polite to mention the rot of his corpse.

There was something that was so deeply sad about the iron press of Harrington’s nice shirt, about his fixed-to-perfection hair. There was something that was so _pretty_ and _tragic_ in the denial that Harrington, how he never mentioned his mortality, never acted like anything was wrong.

Billy wanted to shake him, _you’re dying and there is nothing anybody can do about it._

He wanted to squeeze him tight, _they sent you home to die._

He wanted to kill him, _you fucking corpse._

“You’ve met Dustin at least three times,” Steve pointed out, picking apart a napkin absently in his hands. “And there is a picture of Benny in the Champions display case at school. They renamed the baseball field Hammond Field.”

“I don’t care.”

Harrington shrugged like he didn’t particularly care either but told him anyways, “Dustin is the one that wears the hat. He has the teeth, you know? No collarbones.”

Billy knew who Dustin was.

He knew who all of them were, but, “What?”

“I – he has a disease or something, like. It’s called crypto – something. I don’t know. He wasn’t born with all his bones so he’s like, bendy. Can fit in small spaces.”

“That sounds made up as shit, Harrington.”

“Why would anybody make up something _that_ dumb?” Harrington shrugged, napkin coming to bits between his black fingernails. Billy swore that he could trace the black gooiness of infection clotting in the veins of Harrington’s big hands. “You said Dustin was annoying once.”

“They’re _all_ annoying, Harrington.”

Billy used to imagine a hundred different pointless and meaningless conversations just like this one, back when he got to the school and Harrington wouldn’t raise to any bait. He thought it when Harrington’s face was bruised, and they were both tired, and he laughed when Steve asked for help with his college essays.

It felt so _– dumb_ to be having a conversation like, like they were friends when they _weren’t_. They were really fucking _not_.

Billy didn’t have anything to say, so he didn’t say a goddamn thing.

Harrington didn’t either.

Harrington didn’t have words that he didn’t borrow from Nancy Wheeler, or Dustin ‘Missing Bones’ Henderson, or his grandma. He didn’t have anything that wasn’t a repeat of what Hopper said, or the doctors said, or Jack fucking Kerouac. Harrington had nothing.

Harrington was barely a fucking person.

He was never going to be angry enough to be saved. He was never _going_ to be saved.

Billy didn’t understand it because Steve wasn’t angry – not at him, not a circumstance, not at Hawkins. He didn’t hold on to it, didn’t let it cut his hands and bathe in its blood. He didn’t have the monster inside of him until Billy put it there.

He didn’t grow dark with it. He didn’t get evil, or strong, or _big_ beneath the touch of the Mind Flayer. He got weak.

He was going to die.

“Can I help you?”

 _Please_.

Billy blinked hard.

When he looked, the waitress was some chick with short blond hair and a Band-Aid on her cheek, tapping her pen against the table top. Billy almost knew her. Harrington did.

Her eyes filtered over them both before the set of her hip jolted out. Harrington’s smooth talking needed work, but it didn’t truly matter, “What is this, Dingus?”

“You’re going to be employee of the month someday, Robin,” Steve said, leaning forward. His floppy hair broke from its hairspray hold and fell into his eyes before he leaned back. “I thought you worked the morning shift.”

“I’m covering for a friend,” She said, looking unsettled the way that everybody looked unsettled around the dying. “Are you supposed to be out?”

She schooled her expression into something exasperated, something that only singed at the edges with an overwhelming sadness. The look was harder when it passed to Billy, like everything was harder when it came to Billy, “What are _you_ doing here?”

She was there that night.

She saw the monster that he became and still saw it.

She knew it was him, that it had always been him and always would. She knew that Harrington dropped his fucking bat and came at him with an antidote and a needle, that he got bit and lost blood.

He wondered if she knew that Harrington was going to die, if that dumbass party with all their little rules had extended that information to her.

She looked, and he started back with a set jaw and eyes that were blue, not red, not yellow, not possessed. She was staring into an abyss and that abyss had teeth, had flesh between them, had death on his hands and was making the table that she’d have to clean dirty with it.

Steve broke the silence, “I would kill for some onion rings right now.”

She replied, tearing her gaze away like a razor to skin, “My shift is over in fifteen minutes. I can take you home.”

“I don’t need a ride, Robin, Billy’s driving,” Steve said like it was a _plan,_ a schedule. It was a conversation like Billy wasn’t an active part of the situation, like he wasn’t the monster that lurked in the corners of everybody’s eyes.

His insignificance made him feel angry, feel grateful, feel like he was about to burst apart at the seams into something gooey and gross.

“No,” Robin tried to argue. “Steve, you’re sick. You shouldn’t be out here in the middle of nowhere with –“

_Him. With Billy._

“-Without people that know where you are,” She finished.

Steve told her, “I left a note.”

He said, “I’m fine.”

He asked, “Billy, is there anything you want?”

_Nothing. You._

Billy blinked hard.

He felt something curl into him that felt worn and at home inside of a new body, a looser empty body. He felt an ease in the way that his mouth curled into the razor sharp line of a smirk, and he looked at Robin the way that the old Billy Hargrove looked at everything, _angry, vindictive._ Mean.

“I’d commit _murder_ for a cup of coffee,” He said, letting it linger like a threat. “Sometime today, sweetheart.”

“That’s not funny,” Steve mumbled, watching Robin scurry off to fulfill their order, to talk to the manager about staying later because she wasn’t going to leave Steve hear with the monster that nearly gutted him.

Billy shrugged, falling into his emptiness again, “I thought it was.”

Steve’s gold eyes flickered down over his arms of his sweatshirt to the black beneath his fingernails like he was searching for something. He looked at the bruise on his neck and the frizzy frayed ends of his dead hair. He saw the way that Billy knew that he looked smaller.

Everybody saw the monster first.

It always took a second to realize that there was a man there too, but Harrington looked at him like he never saw the different. He looked at him the same way that he had when his eyes were darker and he was healthy, and he was saying over and over, _you got to fight this, buddy. You got to let me help you._

Billy felt _seen_ in the worst way.

He snapped, “Why did you call me?”

Why did Harrington do anything that he did? Why’d he let him into his room? Why did he save him? Why wasn’t he angry?

Steve shrugged.

He didn’t say, _because I have no friends._ He didn’t say, _I’m bored and the walls were caving in._ He didn’t say, _you killed me so now deal with me._

He didn’t say, _the only people for me are the mad ones, mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved._

He shrugged his shoulders again even though nothing had passed between them. Billy pressed the question deeper, harder, “Why did _you_ call _me?_ What any of this about?”

“I wanted to see you,” Steve said finally, but it sounded like a lie. His gold eyes flickering up to Billy’s and then looking away. “I felt the sun on my face today and it made me think of you, because you’re from California.”

Billy went to the Harrington’s every day except when Steve had appointments. He sat by his bed and they often didn’t even fucking _talk_ until Steve wanted to tell him something stupid and pointless, or until he made him dig in his closet for his dumb jazz band guitar.  

He asked, “Have you been practicing Stairway to Heaven?”

“Why now?” Billy asked, ignoring the question. “You’ve been home for weeks and you decided to leave tonight?”

“I just wanted to talk,” Steve said softly, but didn’t say _why_. His mouth hung open in a kind of gray smile. There was something sad there, something barely there at all that twisted into a smile that was just _teeth_ , fake. “It’s the first time that my Dad has left town on business since I got home and no one was going to stop me.”

Billy blink at him, replaying everything back slowly, “Your dad just – _left_?”

Steve shrugged like that was nothing new, like _he_ was nothing. It was so pathetically easy to see how Steve viewed himself as something to be sat to the side when you were busy. He was dying and his dad just –

“It’s not like there is anything that he can do about this.”

There was only so many things to say to the dying before it got awkward that they weren’t dead, and acceptance was a battle that started long before the final breath grew thin. Acceptance was a cold and bittersweet thing, a relief that felt guilty.

Mr. Harrington got it – James Harrington, who Billy has only ever seen in brief glances and old photographs on the mantel. Steve told him how his dad lost his own father to cancer, his mother to Alzheimer’s. He lost his high school sweetheart to a car crash, and now his only son.

Billy _got_ it. He got wanting to distance yourself from the things that you couldn’t fix, but _fuck_.

Steve was his kid and he left fucking town.

Robin sat their drinks down hard on the table, water for both of them. Billy waited for her to walk away before asking, “What about your mom?”

“Ma drank two glasses of wine, spent an hour calling Dad and accusing him of cheating on her with ‘that whore,’ and then knocked back valium,” Steve shrugged. “She has to take the pills, or she doesn’t sleep. She thinks our house is haunted.”

 _It is_ , Billy’s mind supplied, _by you._

There were those words again, whispering inside of his mind – not Harrington’s, not Kerouac’s, but Ginsberg, _I’m with you in Hawkins where you must feel very strange._ Billy wondered if Harrington’s grandmother ever repeated those words to him.

The silence _ticked_. It _clicked, clacked, clanked_ in between them the way that the clattering noise of the diner didn’t. The bell rung. The cook dropped something. Robin brought their food. Noise happened but not _to_ them.

Billy felt frozen with Harrington – with his black veins and dumb eyes, and all the words that were not his, or his grandmother’s, or anybody’s. He felt _so_ desperately needy to know what _Harrington_ sounded like because – because Steve was going to die without a fucking voice.

He was going to die with other people’s words on his tongue. On the phone line. On his tombstone.

_Mad to live. Mad to talk. Mad to be saved._

“My grandpa used to say that he was living with cancer,” Steve said, picking at the bread of his onion rings. His voice sounded whispered, sudden like he wasn’t aware of what he was going to say until he said it. “He hit my cousin with his cane when he said that he was dying. Like, we all _knew_ that he was dying, but he was living.”

“He said dying was one singular act,” He continued. “You’re alive, then dying, then dead. Dying is like, a minute.”

Harrington’s grandparents sounded like hippies, like Beatniks nothings that were too old to be playing the roles of Dean Moriarty and whatever shitty side character wife Kerouac was writing in the fifties.

Billy’s met Steve’s parents. They were yuppie assholes, fucking uptight watch-checking bitches that complained about hospital bills and Harrington’s dirty hair, sighing and demanding to know _, ‘What on this blessed green earth made you think that you should be in those woods at that hour?’_

It was always _what were you thinking,_ and _what was going through your head,_ and _Steven, are you even listening._ Sometimes Billy wanted to know the same thing, but he didn’t think that Harrington ever thought all that much.

To save Billy – it was an act of stupidity.

There was nothing on _this blessed green earth_ that was ever going to make Billy think that Harrington had a single thought in that pretty little head while he was dropping his bat to fight a monster.

It was why Harrington had so many of other people’s words. It was why he didn’t have any of his own. All of Harrington’s actions and his speech were thought up by someone else or no one at all.

Steve had this backpack with him, something more stylish than practical, and it was filled to the brim with paper. Billy could see a ‘ _see me after class’_ written on the top of one of them as he dug through it, like Harrington didn’t even think to clean that shit out before shoveling more into it.

He asked, “What are you doing?”

 “Gimme a second,” Steve huffed, pulling out a bundle of paper stapled at the top and laid it out on the table. He pressed against the creases to no avail, announcing like Billy would ever care, like they were friends when they weren’t, “Hopper stopped by the other day, after you left.”

“It was like, dinner time,” He continued. “I was eating in my room with my ma, you know and he’s just – _BLAM!_ There. In the doorway.”

Harrington’s breath whistled as he took in gulps of oxygen between words, between bits of onion rings. His teeth were tinted gray with decay until he ran his tongue over it. It was endearing when it shouldn’t have been, “It’s crazy. It’s like, I’m fifteen again, and Hopper’s showin’ up to tell my parents that I didn’t pay my parking tickets.”

“What’s the point in this, Harrington?” Billy asked. “You gonna tell me that Hopper took a shit on the rug, or something?”

“He gave me this,” Steve said, flattening his hand across the crumbled-up paper before sliding it over to Billy. At the top was written in pen _S. Harrington,_ underneath that was typed _Hawkins Police Department Trainee Program._

Billy said in the blandest voice possible, “Neat.”

“After, you know – the fight at the Byers and the tunnels, and everything. I’d asked about it. I thought that I was pretty good helping out and – protecting and serving, or whatever. I – honestly, I don’t know what I said to him, but I asked how to become a cop and he told me no. Full stop. I’m not cut out for it, but…”

“But then he came yesterday with these forms,” Steve said with a smile that was all gray tinted teeth and hollow cheekbones, and skin so thin that it was black and translucent. “He said that he expected to see me there in the fall.”

It reeked of pity.

Harrington was dense, but not that fucking dense.

Harrington’s smile dropped into something too fast to see and then was just there – like nothing was ever wrong, like monsters didn’t exist, like Billy wasn’t one of them, “Fall is next month. School starts next month so – that’s basically fall.”

Harrington didn’t say _I’ll be fine by then,_ didn’t say _I’ll be dead by then,_ but both statements hung in the air like the sword of Damocles, swinging violently between them in the fucking all-night diner.

The optimist and the realist. Alive and dead. Hawkins and the Upside Down. Steve Harrington was the complex working of competing realities. A complete and total contradiction of himself.

He wanted to say, _I’m sorry I fucking killed you._

He wanted to say, _kill me back._

He settled on, “Fucking neato.”

“This support I’m getting from you is like, _wild_ , man. It’s really awe-inspiring and shit. It’s just _so_ supportive, like – your hands are practically wrapped around my spine with how much you are lifting me up right now. It almost gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

Billy smiled all nice and pretty, “I’m going to punch you in your fucking face, Harrington.”

Steve smiled back but didn’t respond so Billy didn’t respond because all the words in his head were screaming _kill me, kill me, kill me,_ and _why aren’t you angry?_ His mind repeated, _I’m with you in Hawkins, mad to live, mad to be saved._

Harrington dropped topics like he dropped girls, like he dropped the fucking bat. He ran out of words in his head and stopped _thinking,_ but he wasn’t stupid.

It was _clever_.

Harrington wasn’t _smart_ , but he was quick. He figured out long before Billy came into his life that if he never stayed in the same place for too long than no one would ever know that he didn’t know anything.

So, no.

Billy was not surprised that Harrington stopped talking about Hopper, like he stopped talking about his grandfather, like he stopped _talking_. He wasn’t surprised, but he was caught off guard when he opened his mouth again, hit with the full force of a question that must have been gaining momentum in Harrington’s mouth.

He felt sucker punched with, “Is your mom dead?”

Billy rolled with it.

He bared his teeth against the sting for a second, but it fizzled out the way that everything eventually fizzled out. He was no longer mad to be saved because he _was_ saved. He hated it, “Excuse me?”

“I think you heard me,” Steve drawled out the words easily, casually. His mouth tilted up into a grin that wavered. For the first time since Starcourt, he couldn’t keep his smile up, “Is she dead, or did she like, move away?”

“Why do you want to know?”

Steve shrugged.

Billy didn’t have to answer because Harrington didn’t _deserve_ the answer to a question like that. He didn’t have to answer, but he found himself answering anyways, “Yes. She died.”

“How?”

Billy didn’t _want_ to tell him anything.

He didn’t want to tell him that it had been her weekend, that he woke up one Saturday morning and she was just different, changed. He didn’t want to say that she used pass out and they all thought that she was just drinking. He didn’t want to say that by the time she got sick enough, they were all just over it.

He didn’t want to tell him how awful words like _terminal,_ and _there’s nothing we can do,_ and _she should be comfortable_ sounded.

He pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, “She had cancer.”

Like Steve’s grandfather.

Living with cancer. Dying from cancer.

“Did it hurt, losing her?” Steve’s voice was baby soft and gentle, but digging, like nails in flesh. He didn’t say _it hurt to lose my grandfather,_ didn’t say _I’m scared._

The thing about the Mind Flayer, about being Flayed, was that it dug, and dug, and dug through you until it was you and everything was tainted.

It was an invasive root. A fish to a pond that should never have been there and now everything was dead. Everything inside of Billy, every memory that it touched. Every moment.

It was all dead.

His mother wasn’t a shining light – she abandoned him, like Neil abandoned him, like Maxine and all her dumb little friends abandoned him to die. But –

Steve.

His big dumb eyes were gold instead of the color of melted dark chocolate. He was looking at him, expecting something from him in exchange for baring his soul about Hopper, about his grandpa.

And just for the dumb story about his dumb grandparents, not for saving his life because saving his life was – _‘There’s nothing to be sorry for, man.’_

Billy wanted to say sorry.

He wanted to go to The Church of Steve and beg for forgiveness.

He won’t tell him about the tumor the size of a baseball, about the – the mass of mutated evil and how he knew that he had turned into the same damn thing. He won’t tell him that she was different and then dead, and that all anybody ever remembered was how she was sick.

All _he_ had left to remember of her was how she was sick, and _yes_.

It fucking _hurt_ so goddamn much.

It hurt more than anything, and then the Mind Flayer came and made it worse. It took the memories that he had clung too from before the cancer, before she left him with Neil. He had been happy, and the Mind Flayer _took_ that.

He doesn’t know why he says it because it sounded mean. It sounded awful, but it was true. He doesn’t know why he opened his mouth and let spill from his lips what he never intended to say out loud, “I wish she’d died sooner.”

She wasn’t a shining light, but occasionally she’d been a safe haven.

She had been an almighty oak tree, the shake of a California storm. She had been the break of a wave that was seven feet tall – something breathtaking and beautiful, and _home_ , but she left the door open when she left him and something crawled through it that wasn’t the dog.

It was insidious and veiny, and turned her beautiful blue-eyed boy into a monster. It turned her safe haven into a cage, into a gate that was swinging open. It turned all those soft memories into a dusty, dark hell that he was forced to live with.

Without her, he never would have to lose those memories.

Without her, the Mind Flayer’s control wouldn’t have snapped.

Without her, there would be no more him.

It would have been him and Neil, and all the cuts and bruises that he had to hide from his new wife and that would have been _okay_. It would have been _bearable_ and then the Mind Flayer would have flayed him into goo. Now he was stuck with thoughts that he knew were supposed to be good, be warm and filling, and all that he felt was – was so fucking _empty._

The look on Harrington’s face wasn’t incomprehensible. Steve wasn’t a smart guy, he wasn’t complicated. He could see him try to understand, could see him fail to do so.

“What do you mean?”

Billy shrugged.

Harrington asked softly, like a hand through a wave and the caress of a cheek before the sting of a slap, “Do you miss her?”

Steve’s fingers were long and thin, and his nails were black beneath them when he reached across the table to squeeze Billy’s hand. Billy pulled his hand back and then took a drink. He took a breath and then another, and another, and spat harsh onto the table, “She fucking died, Harrington. I got over it. That’s how it works.”

Billy _didn’t_ miss her.

There was nothing to miss.

There were days and weeks, and months where he didn’t think about her at all. There were times when it snuck up on him, but it wasn’t pain in his chest. It was a soft _oh_. It was a soft touched reminder that he had a dead parent, that she got fucking _lucky_.

A lot of people had dead parents. A lot of people had dead grandparents.

A lot of people were dying.

It would be exhausting to miss someone every day of your life. It would _hurt_ so much to just have this open wound that was that person, so Billy moved on because Neil _needed_ him to get over it to move on with his own fucking life. He moved on because that was what you _did_. It was what everybody _did._

It was a question without an answer because it was a question without relevance now. The memories weren’t _anything_ , and now, those were gone too.

The Mind Flayer took the good memories and made them feel dirty. Everything that was soft and touching was gone, and he didn’t have it in him to miss any of it. He _couldn’t_.

It used to hurt too much to look into the mirror and see blue eyes and remember her blue eyes, but he couldn’t even _do_ that anymore. He couldn’t look into the mirror and see his blue eyes and think of her because he looked in the mirror and all he saw was red. He saw yellow. He saw blood in his teeth and Harrington’s body below him.

He wasn’t her son anymore and she didn’t belong to him anymore.

She belonged to the Mind Flayer.

He belonged to the Mind Flayer.

They both got changed so much that they were different people. There was no use chasing after a ghost, no use being sad about someone who meant something to the person he wasn’t anymore.

If she’d died sooner, she would have died his mother.

If she’d died sooner, he wouldn’t have memories to lose.

If she’d died sooner, he never would have been angry enough to mess up, to move to Hawkins.

There was a sadness suddenly in Harrington’s weak smile, something so quick and resolute that it flickered in and out and got stored away. It left something bitter in Billy’s mouth, something that he didn’t quite understand and that made him feel nervous.

Harrington wasn’t _complicated._

He should be able to understand him, but he didn’t – he didn’t understand the way that the bitterness congealed on his lips or the way that it felt like finality.

It felt like there was a decision that had been made as Harrington sat up a little straighter, looked a little more loss and a little more tangible. He picked at his onion rings and ate only the breaded parts, and Billy didn’t _get_ it.

“Why do you want to know?” He demanded. “Why are you asking me this?”

Steve’s eyes were slow to flicker away, gold deep, deep down where they shouldn’t have been. He made a decision and Billy didn’t know what it was, so he _shambled_. He watched Harrington’s eyes flicker to the night shift guard at the bar and asked, “Have you ever fired a gun before?”

Billy answered, “No.”

“Me neither,” He shrugged. He looked back to him and said, “Nancy almost shot me in the face once. I didn’t know about the – I just wanted to apologize to Jonathan for being a dick. I’d fucked up major and I just wanted to own up to that.”

Harrington was fucking dying.

Harrington had black beneath his fingernails and gold eyes, and he wheezed when he spoke too much at once. He was good as dead. On the tip of Billy’s tongue was, _I’m sorry._

Steve kept talking about Nancy and shotgunning beer, about how Barb died in the Upside Down. He kept talking about how she threatened to pull the trigger right then and there, in the Byers ruined living room.

“Sometimes I think that she might actually have done it,” He said, shrugging. “I don’t know, sometimes she says things and I think she’s lying, but she’s smarter than me and I’m – I’m not good at figuring out lies. She told me that Lake Michigan was just as good as any beach. Sounds like a lie.”

“It is a fucking lie, Harrington. Jesus _fuck_ ,” Billy swore, feeling for the first time in a long time fucking _angry_. “Jesus. A gross _Midwestern_ lake isn’t even close to a beach. It’s _landlocked,_ which means that it sucks ass.”

“That so?”

“Yes.”

“I mean, I’m not saying that you’re wrong, but what’s the difference?”

So, Billy told him.

He ranted, and he got heated, letting words like ocean waves wash over everything because he _knew_ the beach. The Mind Flayer didn’t fucking ruin the beach.

He told him about how the world felt so damn big when you saw the ocean in the distance. He told him about you would look out and it would spread for as far as you see in front of you, endless. He told him that the air was fresher and salty, and _nice_ , and how the sand could burn your feet if you weren’t wearing shoes.

He told him about seashells cutting his hands and wiping out in the surf, about tourist – how he hated tourist.

And Harrington listened.

He hung on the words and smiled at the visual images that were painted for him, and Billy felt _normal_ until he didn’t. His gut went cold and solid with the realization of what was happening.

His voice croaked, “You’ve never been to the beach.”

Harrington just smiled.

It hit all at once.

Not like the new wedding band on his father’s fist. Not like the needle that had pierced his skin and turned him human again. It hit like a pen dropped into the sea.

It didn’t make a sound, but it happened.

It didn’t make a difference, but it was there.

Steve wanted to know because he was never going to see the beach.

He was never going to get that chance.


End file.
